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posted by janrinok on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the tell-the-whole-truth dept.

The Center for American Progress reports

Tesla has expanded its list of worker injuries following a report published in Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, which flagged under-counting and safety problems at the company's Fremont, California facility last month.

The move also comes one week after CEO and founder Elon Musk blasted the media for reporting on the discrepancies and threatened to start a Yelp-like site to rate journalists.

"Tesla disputed our reporting showing that it left worker injuries off the books", Reveal tweeted [May 29]. "Now, it's begun adding some of the injuries that had been missing."

The original Reveal report, published on April 16, claimed that Tesla officials were under-reporting work-related injuries sustained by employees in order to make the company's safety numbers appear more favorable to industry critics. The company instead wrote many complaints off as "personal medical issues or minor incidents requiring only first aid", according to internal company records. In May, pressure on the company doubled after an unfavorable review by Consumer Reports found troubling flaws in the Tesla Model 3's braking system, the second critical report from the austere publication.

Responding to the criticism last week, Musk went on a Twitter rant, claiming that the negative press was part of "a calculated disinformation campaign."

[...] Reveal's criticisms appear to have some merit, however. As the outlet noted on [May 29], following Musk's Twitter rant and the earlier media reports, Tesla officials allegedly quietly revised the company's books to add more names to the company's list of worker injuries, including at least "13 injuries from 2017 that had been missing when Tesla certified its legally mandated injury report earlier this year."

"Alaa Alkhafagi, for example, smashed his face and arm in the paint department last fall. He said he had been asked to perform a task for which he had no training", reporter Will Evans wrote. "At the time of the injury, Tesla didn't put Alkhafagi on official injury logs, even though the accident caused him to miss work. ...By late April, Tesla had added him to the 2017 logs, dating his injury Oct. 1 and noting that he missed three days of work because of it."


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @06:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @06:05AM (#686619)

    On a parallel tack, recently, radio/TV presenter Thom Hartmann noted that he had had his name on their waiting list to get one of their "cheap" sedans.

    The other day, he called up the company and told them to take his name off the list.
    When they asked him why, he said it was because of Musk doing his alt-Reich thing on the media.
    Another billionaire going all Trumpenstein on the media because they criticized him is something we don't need.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

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